New Delhi, Mar 22 (IANS): Technology giant IBM on Monday launched the fourth edition of the annual "Call for Code" global challenge to tackle the existential threat of climate change.

This year's competition invites the world's software developers and innovators to combat climate change with open source-powered technology.

Now in its fourth year, the Call for Code Initiative has grown to more than 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 nations, and has generated more than fifteen thousand applications.

It aims to drive immediate and lasting humanitarian progress around the world through the creation of practical applications built on open source-powered software, including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, atmospheric data from IBM's Weather Company, and developer resources and APIs from partners like Intuit and New Relic.

"Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and we must apply our collective ingenuity and cutting-edge technologies to make a lasting difference," Ruth Davis, Director of Call for Code, IBM, said in a statement.

"Together with our ecosystem of partners, IBM will work with the winning team to incubate and deploy their solution in communities where it's most needed, just as we've done with past winners."

Last year's winning solution, Agrolly, is an app designed to support small farmers by providing climate and crop predictions and recommendations.

Since October, the Agrolly team has expanded their solution to new markets and provided hands-on training to more than 500 rural farmers across Mongolia, India, and Brazil, who are testing and using the app to fight the effects of climate change.

Agrolly is also working with the IBM Service Corps on a deployment plan to improve and test their technology in the coming months.

Call for Code has generated more than 30 solutions that are being incubated and field tested in a series of deployments, including 12 open source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation, enabling these projects to evolve through the power of the open source community.

IBM has this year added a standalone award of $5,000 for India.

There are 24.5 million developers in the world, with India being second-largest at 4.1 million and the fastest growing developer base globally.

India and the US are the only nations projected to have more than 5 million developers by 2025.